Read Selected Portions of the Esquire Mag. Profile on Climate Depot (April 2010 Hardcopy at Newsstands -- Tina Fey Cover)Tuesday, March 30, 2010By Marc Morano – Climate Depot
The April 2010 issue of Esquire Magazine features a more than 6500 word feature article on Climate Depot's Executive Editor Marc Morano. Selected Esquire Article Excerpts:
Marc Morano broke the Swift Boat story and effectively stalled John Kerry's presidential run. Now he is working against an even bigger enemy: belief in climate change. Somehow, he seems to be winning. [...] At the peak of the consensus, 84 percent of Americans thought global warming was a threat. The only thing they agreed on more was the existence of God. Then Morano got hired as the communications director for Jim Inhofe, the dyspeptic senator from Oklahoma. Setting to work, he began compiling so many inflammatory stories and documents on Inhofe's Web site, Newsweek said he was "more like a wire service than a spokesman." He began to use the Web in pugnacious new ways, like printing the e-mail addresses of reporters and scientists and inviting readers to pester them. All this made Inhofe's office the global center of the resistance, but it also infuriated people. "Morano is unquotable and uncitable," said one influential climate blog. "Besides his penchant for smear, he just makes stuff up." Another investigated his e-mail list. A scientist threatened him with a libel suit. Eventually other Republicans started telling Inhofe to fire him — he was unprofessional, they said. He appealed to Inhofe's worst instincts. Morano took those as compliments. [...] Morano has fun with it too, using goofy illustrations like a cartoon hand hammering a nail into a coffin and a Scooby Doo villain getting his mask pulled off. People tell him this is too childish for a publication that affects global policy, but it's part of his vision for his Web site — climate entertainment, he calls it. [...] As the words leave his fingers and become electric ones and zeros in the information cloud, other people start responding. One of the first is James Delingpole of London's Daily Telegraph: "If you own any shares in alternative-energy companies I should start dumping them NOW." Morano's Google alerts pick up the new tidbit and he slaps on another headline and adds it to his Web page. Then other people pick up his stuff and he writes about that and someone else writes about that until it's all swirling around like a digital dust devil in a Michael Crichton novel. Soon Morano's caution begins to fade. [...] If they are real and not fake, he writes, this is absolute dynamite, and will destroy the credibility of the alarmist cause. Physicist on alleged behavior of CRU scientists: "These people should be put in jail as soon as possible." A scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. By dawn, he's done fifteen or twenty headlines and the American media is starting to wake up. New posts are popping up everywhere. "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud," says Patrick Michaels, a contrarian climatologist at the Cato Institute. "The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century," says syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin. "Proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in modern science," says Andrew Bolt of the Australia Herald-Sun. And finally the big kahuna, el Rushbo himself. This is on his afternoon radio show, maybe eight hours after Morano finally conks out on his pillow. "Something fascinating has happened," Limbaugh begins, giving his listeners a few hints about a "substantial fraud" at the highest levels of the global-warming scare machine and then referring them to Morano's site. "All the details are there. It's a great place to keep up on the global-warming debate. He's probably single-handedly, in a civilian sense, the guy — other than me, of course — doing a better job of ringing the bells alarming people of what's going on here."
So many people rush to Morano's site they overwhelm the servers and the site crashes. [...] This is what Morano has been training for his whole life. After "Our Man in Washington" fizzled out, he became the go-to guy for stories in which the king has no clothes, first at a 60 Minutes wannabe called American Investigator and then at CNS News. He specialized in exposés of animals-rights activists, rain-forest warriors, and holier-than-thou Hollywood do-gooders. A classic Morano story was adding up how much the movie stars spent on planes to visit some sustainable ecovillage in Africa. [...] Now, as he stands at the lectern at the front of the room, he's a professional, smooth and confident. He has the advantage of an absolutely clear purpose, running down the plays like a guerrilla leader planning an attack on an enemy village. "Don't quote the skeptics," he begins. "Use the words of their fellow scientists." [...] Morano is always genial, and he's careful not to go too far — one reporter who tussles with him mentions his "lawyerly precision." What Inhofe actually said was that "catastrophic global warming is a hoax," for example. But he knows that the details aren't as important as the story, and there's no better story than greedy politicians grinding the free man under their boot heels. The senator who called cap-and-trade the "most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time"? That's all you need to know. This is an ideology. Al Gore saying the U. S. climate bill will help bring about "global governance"? This isn't about science! It's about controlling humans. [...] But it's always clear that he'd rather have fun. This is his genius, especially in a world given to screaming caps and paranoid detail. It's another way he's changing the narrative, showing that one side has a sense of humor. He recites the "Al Gore Earth Prayer." Al Gore, who art in thy fully offset private jet, forgive us our emissions.... [...] Yes, the Climate-gate story is huge, he says, a game changer, like the Death Star at the end of Star Wars. Politicians are running for cover! Their movement collapsing in disgrace! He has the zest of a child documenting the mistakes of the grown-ups in his little notebook of vindication. Read Full Esquire Magazine profile here.
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